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Posts Tagged ‘Bit Snoop’

January 4th, 2011

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Anti-Piracy Outfit Threatens Pan-Indian Torrent Site Ban

AiPlex Software, the Indian anti-piracy outfit that made a name for itself when it allegedly DDoSed several major BitTorrent sites including The Pirate Bay, has returned to the scene. The outfit is once again sending out many DMCA takedown requests to torrent sites. In addition, they threaten to impose a pan-Indian ban by the local Government on sites that dare to contest their requests, even when they have the right to do so.

Image is Loading.... Anti-piracy outfits come in different shapes and forms. The largest group are so called DMCA-agents, usually small companies that help copyright holders to prevent their content from spreading over the Internet. They are tasked with sending takedown requests to sites that host or link to their content, including Google, Twitter and torrent sites.

While the majority of these outfits do their job with a relative low profile, there are a few oddballs that continue to make the news due to their unconventional tactics. In the past we’ve covered the mysterious ways of the Web-Sheriff, and more recently the Indian based company AiPlex Software has been making a name for itself.

Last September Girish Kumar, managing director of AiPlex Software, admitted that his company DDoSed torrent sites that were not complying with their DMCA takedown requests. “We flood the website with requests, which results in database error, causing denial of service as each server has a fixed bandwidth capacity,” he said at the time.

This revelation was not appreciated by everyone, and led to the start of Anonymous’ Operation Payback which took down the AiPlex website for days on end. A costly attack for the Indian multi-purpose firm that also specializes in medical transcription and search engine optimization.

Despite this setback AiPlex is not backing down, on the contrary. Although the DDoS attacks seem to have stopped the outfit has continued to harass torrent site owners, often incorrectly. Now Bitsnoop has alerted us to an interesting email conversation he had with AiPlex’s managing director.

A few days ago Bitsnoop’s owner received a takedown request for the following torrent, which linked to a copy of the Indian blockbuster Tees Maar Khan. The torrent site owner quickly took the linked page offline and thought the case was settled, but he was wrong. Yesterday, AiPlex’s general manager Girish Kumar sent a reminder for the file that was already removed.

For Bitsnoop’s owner these type of incorrect reminders are an annoyance, and he replied to AiPlex that similar unverified requests will be ignored in the future. Girish Kumar obviously failed to see the mistake he made, but quickly replied with an oddly worded, brand new and unprecedented threat.

HI,

In that case we may have pull the cat out of the bag & ban u completely…Anyways, if u don’t confirm to adhere to our Infringement notification requests, we will be forced send ur website details to the Indian Govt. to further ban ur site across pan India. In fact we have done this to several sites & u are given the last chance to comply the request…

Awaiting for ur earnest reply,
Best,

Girish Kumar N
Managing Director
Aiplex Software Pvt. Ltd.

Really?

It is hard to take any of the above response seriously and indeed Bitsnoop’s owner wisely ignored it. Needless to say, through these unusual threats AiPlex is not making themselves popular among site owners. We contacted Girish Kumar to hear more about their close ties and influence within the Indian authorities, but we have yet to receive a reply.

Of course this is just one side of the daily DMCA troubles torrent site owners face, there are also many agents that are more pleasant to work with, and these usually get more done. When the takedown notices are complete and properly formatted most torrent site owners will cooperate and take the infringing links offline quickly.

AiPlex has obviously chosen to go down another route, which makes it harder for them to succeed. But, this doesn’t matter much for them of course, they’ll simply ask the Indian Government to ban Bitsnoop and The Pirate Bay, making piracy a thing of the past.

And putting themselves out of the anti-piracy business in the process.

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November 25th, 2010

General, Trackers

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BitSnoop Breaks 10 Million Indexed Torrents

BitTorrent engine BitSnoop has the honor of being the fastest growing torrent site in 2010. After a terrible disaster in February the site lost its entire database and had to go offline for a couple of months. Skip a few months forward and BitSnoop is back on top as one of the leading indexers, with over 10 million indexed torrents covering a massive 12,049,125 GB of data.

BitSnoop was one of the most successful new torrent site launches of 2009. The site started out indexing a healthy 1,480,666 torrents and users particularly seemed to like the usability and its clean interface.

It went public in October last year and quickly gained a steady user base in the months that followed. Unfortunately, the site suddenly disappeared in February due to several crucial mistakes.

“Our host has screwed up hard drive replacement in RAID array,” the BitSnoop team informed us. “They’ve replaced the wrong drive two times in a row, which caused all data to be destroyed. We did not have full backup at that moment, so it was partly our fault.”

BitSnoop eventually returned in May this year and not without leaving an impression. The torrent indexer started from zero and is without a doubt the fastest growing torrent site of the year. Not only in traffic, but also in the library of indexed torrents that keeps on expanding.

This week the site reached a new milestone when the 10 millionth torrent was added to the index.

At the time of writing BitSnoop has 10,211,341 indexed torrents, of which 3,703,060 are currently active. These numbers make the site one of the largest torrent databases that we know of, nearing the range of established sites such as Torrentz and isoHunt, and beating KickassTorrents and The Pirate Bay by a a few million torrents.

Some additional mind-boggling statistics:

Trackers indexed: 10,277

Active trackers indexed: 2,413

Data indexed: 12,049,125 GB

Files indexed: 310.24 million

In terms of visitors the site has been doing well too. It’s currently on its way to entering the top 10 most visited torrent sites on the Internet with well over a million page views a day. Needless to say, servicing these numbers requires quite a lot of hardware. The BitSnoop team was kind enough to give us a sneak peak behind the scenes and find out what’s powering the BitTorrent indexer.

BitSnoop’s data crunching box and indexer backend both run on Dual 4-core Xeons 2.33 GHz, with 32 GB RAM and SAS disks in RAID10. The search query server is a 4-core Xeon 2.6 GHz, with 16 GB RAM and SATA in RAID1. The web frontends are VPSes, and some small VPSes for utility and infrastructure purposes. All the current hardware is rented but BitSnoop’s plans to buy their own servers in the near future.

The BitSnoop team further assured us that they will do all they can to keep the site running smoothly. The main focus for future improvements will be on usability. Currently they are working on several new features including a ‘TV show finder’, improved detection of fake files, some social features and tag based browsing and searches.

And most importantly, more torrents will be indexed, with 15 million being the next big milestone.

In relatively little time BitSnoop has become an established name in the public BitTorrent community. The site offers one of the best API’s that’s currently in use by several other torrent sites, and they also collaborate with academic researchers who wish to learn more about the BitTorrent ecosystem.

It definitely looks like BitSnoop is here to stay, and despite a difficult start of the year with months of downtime, it deserves to be crowned the fastest growing BitTorrent site of 2010. They hereby follow in the footsteps of KickassTorrents, who ‘won’ this unofficial (but honorary) title last year.

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September 13th, 2010

Anti-Piracy, Gang Gang Play

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Anti-Piracy Boss Denies DoS Attacks, Torrent Site Refutes Claim

Anti-piracy outfit AiPlex Software made the news last week when its boss was quoted in the press admitting that his company launched DoS attacks against uncooperative torrent sites. Although the reports and quotes were quite specific, the company is now trying to distance itself from the claims. However, correspondence obtained by us shows another side to these unorthodox Bollywood anti-piracy enforcers.

“When we detect a website offering a link or a download, we contact the server hosts and intimate them about the illegal activity. They issue a notice to the site owner,” said AiPlex Software’s Girish Kumar a couple of weeks ago. “If the site owner does not comply, the site is either suspended or dismissed.

AiPlex, a company working for Bollywood studios and charging between $4,290 and $8,580 to protect a movie, go further than your average anti-piracy outfit when people don’t co-operate with them.

“The problem is with torrent sites, which usually do not oblige,” said Kumar. “In such cases, we flood the website with requests, which results in database error, causing denial of service as each server has a fixed bandwidth capacity. At times, we have to go an extra mile and attack the site and destroy the data to stop the movie from circulating further.”

Understandably there’s a bit of a ‘wow factor’ associated with these claims, not least that carrying out DoS attacks against sites is a criminal offense in many countries around the world, even if you do happen to be working for the all-powerful movie industry.

Although we contacted AiPlex for a comment but never received a reply, others have had more luck. Last week AiPlex contacted the BitSnoop torrent site with a copyright takedown demand for a movie they are protecting on behalf of a studio. In their correspondence, BitSnoop took the opportunity to ask AiPlex about their unorthodox approach to dealing with uncooperative torrent sites. Surprisingly Managing Director Girish Kumar denied the claims.

“Our claim with the Editor [of the publication originally publishing his comments, article still online, unedited] was pointblank that we go an extra mile in identifying the IP addresses & other contact info of such illegal sites & pass such information to the production houses to pursue with the cyber crime police,” he told BitSnoop.

“Further if the govt. provides a permission to cyber police to attack such sites, Aiplex can help the cyber police in providing the technical inputs. That said, one of the common method one can bring down the site is DDOS attack is what was explained. This does not mean that we are doing such illegal activates while we are sending the copyright notices to Infringed sites.”

So given this statement it was quite interesting to speak with the admins at ICTorrent, a private Desi tracker mentioned specifically as an AiPlex target in the original article.

“This company has contacted us 100s of times in the past; None of their emails had a PROPER Copyright Infringement Notice,” We were told. Indeed, we saw copies of several emails where AiPlex demanded proactive action from ICTorrent to remove movie torrents that weren’t even on the site yet.

But scrappy takedown notices aside, what happened when ICTorrent failed to comply with AiPlex’s demands? Did they DoS the site or not?

“Yes, they have done it many times and failed,” an admin explained while showing us an email from AiPlex which stated simply: ict attack on. enjoy

“We have been dealing with this shit since Dec/2009 from them. We usually get attacked Thursday night till Sunday as this is our primetime to release PDVDs. They DDoS attacked us by sending 1 million requests from 10 to 100 IPs, we had to block all IPs. Our servers are installed with all modules so they will block automatically.”

“I have also made a call to the company and had talked to them to stop DDOS attacks,” an admin told us.

We were also shown a particularly surprising email exchange where a member of AiPlex’s staff asked for a copy of a movie due to him being “a die hard fan” of a particular Bollywood actor. ICTorrent refused the request and told him to download it from the site instead.

Another email clearly suggested that money could be made by both parties if an agreement was reached and ICTorrent was “helpful” with takedowns.

ICTorrent also showed us other documents which showed which movie company AiPlex were acting on behalf of, but asked us not to publish them. Yet.

Reading between the lines it seems that ICTorrent want to give AiPlex another opportunity to stop their DoS attacks.

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August 17th, 2010

Anti-Piracy, Copyright Issues, Gang Gang Play

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Hollywood Targets 8.2 Million Torrents at Bitsnoop

While Bitsnoop may not have the profile of The Pirate Bay, make no mistake, this site is a major BitTorrent player. The site indexes more than 8 million torrents linking to roughly 9 petabytes of data. In the last few days Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN began threatening the site with the clear aim of bringing its activities to an end.

Last month, with a hint of tongue in our cheeks and doubt in our minds, we reported that Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN had been slaying torrent sites by the hundred. According to the Hollywood-backed group, it forced the closure of 422 “illegal sites” including 384 torrent sites so far in 2010, a herculean feat by anyone’s standards.

While BREIN wouldn’t tell us the names of any of the sites, we later discovered the names of a few and although many were very, very small, there were others (admittedly non-torrent sites) with fairly significant traffic.

Today we bring news that BREIN have been continuing their aggression – this time against a BitTorrent site with a considerably higher profile. By torrents indexed, BitSnoop is certainly one of the BitTorrent big boys – 8,247,385 torrents linking to a mind-boggling 8.97 PB of data at time of publication.

BREIN’s threats follow their usual tried and tested format. Bitsnoop are accused of “providing systematic and structural access to content without the authorization of the copyright and neighbouring rights holders” via a system “which facilitates, enables and participates in the distribution of infringing files”.

BREIN indicates the operation of such a site is a crime under Dutch law and warns of the possibility of server seizures, arrests and custody arrangements for suspects.

“The maximum punishment for (aiding and abetting) professional infringement is 4 years imprisonment or 67,000 euro fine for natural persons and 670,000 euro for legal entities,” explains BREIN General Counsel Pieter Haringsma. “In addition the prosecution usually claims the proceeds of the criminal activity. At the same time injured parties can join the criminal action in order to obtain damages or file civil action to claim those.”

So what will Bitsnoop have to do in order to avoid trouble? BREIN suggests closure.

“In the interest of and on behalf of the rights holders represented by BREIN and in order to avoid civil action and/or criminal prosecution, we request you and your organization to cease and desist immediately the above mentioned unlawful activities and to provide us immediately with the official name and geographical address of the entity or person(s) providing the website and tracker services,” Haringsma concludes.

The owners of Bitsnoop acknowledge receipt of the threats, but don’t appear to be particularly fazed by them. Instead they have have chosen to neutralize BREIN by putting a backup plan into action which unsurprisingly doesn’t involve voluntarily handing over their names and addresses as requested.

“Today we’ve got a long letter from BREIN, demanding to shut down the site, bend over and take it up the arse,” Bitsnoop told us, while adding that the site has now seamlessly moved to Spain – an established file-sharing safe haven.

“Of course [BREIN boss] Tim Kuik will trumpet his victory – but this is just ridiculous, he obviously does not care about copyrights, he just wants to suck on MPAA/RIAA funding – hundreds of ‘closed’ torrent sites look good in corporate reports.”

“All this caused Bitsnoop to be offline for a whopping 10 minutes, which is surely a glorious victory for Kuik!”

Tim Kuik told us that he has no comment to make on specific cases but took the opportunity to clarify terminology.

“We are not issuing ‘threats’ but instead summons to cease and desist illegal activity. In the event they persist in such illegal activity appropriate legal measures will be taken.”

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